Hold the Dark : A Novel

“Girald’s unrelenting, perfectly paced prose whips the book along to an unnerving conclusion. By the end, we feel, as Core does ‘that man belongs neither in civilization nor nature—because we are aberrations between two states of being.’” New Yorker

“Fierce, extraordinary…Hold the Dark is an unnerving and intimate portrayal of nature gone awry. It’s all but bereft of levity, spectacularly violent, and exquisitely written.” New York Times Book Review

“Maybe it all began with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in 1938, but there is a variety of modern thriller, created these days by Robert Stone and Denis Johnson at their best, that delivers narrative thrust and beautifully composed sentences by the pageful even as it peels away the thin membrane that separates entertainment from art, and nature from civilization. Here’s Boston writer William Giraldi adding to the slender ranks of such masterly fiction…[Hold the Dark] certainly stands out as one of the decade’s best books of its kind, and one that deserves, because of its stylish flaunting of some of our darkest fears, a future readership.” Boston Globe

“There’s an oddness and otherness to this place, and Giraldi speaks its taut, original language. To appreciate its power fully, Hold the Dark should be read closely—not so much for clues to the mystery but rather for an appreciation of how language bridges worlds.” Chicago Tribune

“Hold the Dark is a mystery novel with all the right ingredients: tough characters, beautifully dangerous landscapes, revenge, a detective on the chase, a husband going after his wife, and enough bullet casings to rattle in the mind long after the story is finished.” Washington Review of Books

“Utterly brilliant…Hold the Dark is that rarest of literary beasts: a novel whose sentences gleam like gemstones but whose pages carry you along like a bullet train.” Los Angeles Review of Books

“Hold the Dark is a powerful meditation on nature, violence, and responsibility with the concentration of a fable or fever dream—a book hard to get out of your mind long after you’ve put it down.” Thomas McGuane, National Book Award–nominated author of Ninety-Two in the Shade

“Giraldi’s back-country Alaska is a savagely amoral place where the constant struggle for survival brings out the most elemental aspects of humanity. This work travels deep into the most ancient and primitive realms of being, offering an unflinching—and more than a little frightening—exploration of the domains of the unconscious that are more commonly the province of myth and fairy tale.” Library Journal (starred review)